EGYPTIAN HISTORY.

MY DEAR BOYS,—

LETTER I.

Since I returned from Egypt, you have asked me several times to teach you some Egyptian history. We made an attempt at it last holidays, but I think without any very signal success. On some rainy afternoons, and on one or two hot mornings, I succeeded in collecting you all together in one room, and in opening before you, Rawlinson's "Herodotus," or the first volume of Sir Gardner Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt;" but the lecture I intended to give you on the subject never prospered as I could have wished.

You had always so many questions to ask, and so many objections to make,-you grew so impatient over the long lists of hard names, and over the contradictory opinions of the various authorities on disputed points, that it was hardly possible that much progress should be made; and I was not surprised, though a little mortified, when one of you remarked, that you thought you knew rather less about Egyptian history, at the end of the last lecture, than you did when our readings commenced. I have been thinking over the matter since we parted, and I am not astonished that

your ardour for studying what is really one of the most interesting of all histories, should have been cooled by the difficulties you met with on first setting

out.

I confess that, before I had been in Egypt, I thought Egyptian History quite as dull as you do now. I used to wonder how people could admire the great thicklipped statues in the British Museum, and what pleasure they could take in examining the odd dog-headed vases, and stiff little blue gods, which to me all looked so exactly like one to another. Even when I was introduced to that oldest mummy-case, whose inhabitant lived probably some hundred years before Abraham, I did not feel as much enthusiasm as I knew I ought to feel. It was not to me so really venerable as Mary Queen of Scots' signet-ring, and it did not call up half such interesting associations as Magna Charta did.

Now that I have seen the grand old temples, and wonderful tombs from which these relics were taken, I cannot describe to you how different they look to me. The hieroglyphic names on the tablets and the statues are no longer mere hard words to me, they call up the remembrance of persons and places, and serve as a link to carry me back in thought to the far, far off ages which I can now feel really were; when mankind and the world were young,-when poetry, art, science, government, and languages were beginning to be.

That we should have the opportunity of tracing these in their infancy; that the history of the old time should have been preserved for us, and that men of our day should have overcome the almost insurmountable difficulties that lay in the way of opening it out for us,